About Me

There was an earlier day in my life when I had plenty of time and no money for my hobby, now I have money for my hobby and not so much time. I never stopped playing with toy soldiers "much to my mothers chagrin" exchanging the sandbox, green armymen and rocks for Donald Featherstone's book Wargames, AWI soldiers from the back of a comic book, dice and rulers. Those early games were great fun and very exciting. Eventually I graduated to more complicated systems, better miniatures, headaches, rule arguments and basically not a lot of fun. I thought about ditching the hobby altogether. I realized recently that I like a good game of toy soldiers. I like the look of toy soldiers and I like the way a simple game plays. I like the trusty d6.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

The Battle of Gorni Dubnik at ColdWars07

So my first game at the convention was Friday at 4PM in the main gaming room. We drove up in the middle of an ice storm passing easily 2 dozen cars stuck in the median, flipped upside down and crashed after sliding across the highway into oncoming traffic. A ride that normally takes 2 hours took over 5 hours; we simply didn’t drive faster then 40mph (miles per hour for my friends outside of the US).

We setup the game between 3 and 4 and we were ready to begin playing just a few minutes before 4. You can follow the setup in the slide show attached to this posting.

Basically; Gen Gourko, the hero of Shipka Pass was given command of the Russian Guard Corps. He was told to eradicate the Turkish position at Gorni Dubnik. This was one of the fortified positions that were being used to keep Plevna supplied. The Guards assaulted from the East, South and West and took horrendous casualties. They did finally take the position as the sun was setting; however, the loss of so many of the Tsars beloved Guardsmen almost cost Gourko his command.

Anyway the game was to kick off at 4 although at 4:45 no one had showed. That’s right, nobody. So I went to registration and they said you can tear the game down if you want. I asked if my friends and I could play and at registration they said do what you want. During the game lots of folks stopped by to look and to chat. It seemed as though the game was well received. I invited lots of folks to come by Saturday at noon when we would be playing the battle of Lovitch. But nobody stayed to play, oh well, we had a great time. More importantly the changes I’ve made to the rules worked perfectly. The game was fun, gave realistic results, easy to play and we fought the game to a conclusion in 3 hours. We moved approximately 300 figures over a 5x10 table and had a great game with silly hats!

If you’d like to view the fight click on the picture below and view the slide show or individual pictures.

4 Comments:

Anonymous said...

The weather was definitely a pity, although ColdWars07 still seemed pretty well attended by the time I got there on Saturday (barely - with an inch of ice still on the road in Lancaster). I recall you had a few players too. Wish I could have stayed, but count me in for the next skirmish, convention or local. Also, again, great looking figures!-George

I can imagine the work that went into it, so my heart sank when I read the comment that nobody showed up, as it's happened to me! I have since made certain that I browbeat at least one friend into signing up (and showing up!) for any game I run!